Well, look at the sequence number just after the CREATE DATABASE
statement (assuming you created it in archive log mode). My first
switch said 2, presumably 1 was creating the system ts. So the number
of switches would be one less than the sequence number?

All sorts of things can go wrong, may or may not mean anything. Do
you have standby, or multiple arc destinations? One must always
assume a network will munge things up, and 8i standby architecture
doesn't quite understand this. Worst case, it can hang your primary
db, so definitely open a tar and get after your network admins if this
happens repeatedly.